Purpose

To consolidate, disseminate, and gather information concerning the 710 expansion into our San Rafael neighborhood and into our surrounding neighborhoods. If you have an item that you would like posted on this blog, please e-mail the item to Peggy Drouet at pdrouet@earthlink.net

Friday, October 17, 2014

IBEW Never Loses a Chance to Lose … More Jobs, Business Lost to SoCal

RAIL CAR COMPANY HEADS FOR
FRIENDLIER NEIGHBORHOOD-Sounds like the perfect job/manufacturing plan
for Southern California, right? We're starting a host of
decades-overdue rail projects, most of them light rail, and having
global rail car leader Kinkisharyo build just under $1 billion of light
rail cars in LA World Airports-leased land in Palmdale is a no-brainer,
right? Wrong!Until the enlightened IBEW and
other labor unions who dominated the opposing "Antelope Valley Residents
for Reasonable Development" came along, an agreement with Kinkisharyo
to build this rail car facility in Palmdale seemed like an obvious fit
for all parties involved.

Publicly, the opposition claimed to be concerned about environmental
factors, but the REAL problem was that IBEW Local No. 11 and Kinkisharyo
could not agree on using card check at the proposed facility to create a union and collective bargaining.

Kinkisharyo is the El Segundo-based U.S. arm of Kinki Sharyo Co Ltd.
of Osaka, Japan, and is on a legally-imposed deadline to meet its
commitments to Metro to build dozens of cars for the future Expo Line,
Foothill Gold Line, and our expanding LA County MetroRail system. The
first delivery is due this month.

The environmental issues raised were appropriate, at one level--doing
EIR's based on the mid-1990's would raise the concerns of a lot of
folks if this were done in Los Angeles...

...except this was vacant land in Palmdale, and even in LA the option
of a Mitigated Negative Declaration (no EIR, but some mitigations) or
Negative Declaration (no EIR) can fit the bill under the right
circumstances. Time was of the essence!

So much for California building a green economy, as Kinkisharyo
follows Tesla out of the California anti-business environment that gets
in the way of building jobs, lives and a better future for all.

This wasn't overdeveloped LA but underdeveloped Palmdale (home of the
airport that the airlines have abandoned), and JOBS should have been
the order of the day. The land was there, the zoning was right, and the
rail cars are so overdue they should have been built yesterday.

But the IBEW never loses a chance to lose, and now our future light rail fleet will be built outside of California.

So meanwhile, while the rest of us often have to resort to multiple
jobs to stay ahead, or leave retirement to make sure we're financially
stable, the good people of Palmdale will have the golden opportunity to
have no jobs whatsoever.

Or maybe residents of the Palmdale region can follow Kinkisharyo to
Nevada, Texas or anywhere else that realizes that job creation is the
critical underpinning to any region.

Way to go, IBEW and Big Labor. Glad we got you looking out for the little guy!